Family TreeYour family’s information
What Family Tree keeps, who can see it, and how it is looked after. Written plainly, without promises nobody can keep.
What is stored
The account you sign in with (your name, email address and a hashed password, never the password itself), the trees you create or are invited to, the people and relationships in them, and the photos and documents you upload.
Who can see a tree
- Only the people the owner shares it with. Trees are not public and are not listed anywhere.
- Each person is an owner, an editor or a viewer. Viewers cannot change anything.
- A viewer linked to their own place in a tree sees their own branch rather than the whole tree.
- Every addition, edit and deletion is recorded with who made it and when, and the owner can read that history.
Where it lives
The app runs on Amazon Web Services: pages, photos and documents in Amazon S3 behind Amazon CloudFront, and the application itself on AWS Lambda. The family graph is stored in Neo4j AuraDB, a managed graph database. Everything travels over encrypted HTTPS connections.
Backups
The whole family graph is exported every night and each backup is kept for 35 days, so a mistake or a deleted branch can be recovered. Backups are never served to the web.
The demo family
The public demo is a made-up family. These are not real people and are not meant to represent real people; names, dates, places and life stories are generated, and any resemblance to anyone living or dead is a coincidence. The demo account can only look.
Questions or removal
An owner can delete a tree at any time. To ask about your information or to have your account removed, contact Shawn Mervin, who built and runs Family Tree.